“Well, from the first, the whole thing smelled of suicide to me. Every step Mottram took seemed to be the calculated step of a man who was leading up to some deliberate dénouement. He was mysterious, he was excited, when he went round the other night to the Cathedral house. When he came here, he made the most obvious attempts to try to behave as if everything was going on just as usual. He made fussy arrangements about being called in the morning; he pretended to have left a letter half-finished; he put a novel down by the bedside, wound up his watch, put studs in his shirt—he did everything to create the surface impression, good enough (he thought) for the Coroner, that whatever else was the truth suicide was out of the question. He made one or two slips there—writing down his name in the visitors’ book with a blank for his date of departure, as if any guest ever did that; putting the flies ready on his rod, but (so Pulteney tells me) the wrong kind of flies. To make sure that there was not a verdict of suicide, he even made arrangements—through Brinkman, through Mrs. Davis, I don’t know how—to have the gas in his bedroom turned off again after it had done its work. Then he tossed off his sleeping draught, turned the gas on, and got into bed. I was sure of all that, even before I went over to Pullford, before you got the telegram from London. What I couldn’t understand was the motive; and now that’s as plain as daylight. He was determined to endow the Pullford Diocese with half a million, so as to be sure of having his nest well lined in the next world. He knew that Christian morality doesn’t permit suicide, but he thought he was all right, because he was only doing evil in order that good might come of it. And so he got rid of the spectre of a painful death from disease, and at the same time made sure, he thought, of a welcome on the other side, if there should prove to be an eternity.”
“Well, that’s your idea. I don’t deny it hangs together. But it comes up against two things—fatally, I think. If Mottram was so set upon endowing the Pullford Diocese, why did he bequeath most of his fortune to a footling Town Council and only leave the diocese the one bit of money which, if a verdict of suicide was given, could never be touched? And granted that he was at pains to get someone to turn off the gas for him, so as to avoid the appearance of suicide, why did he tell that person to lock the door, and leave the key on the wrong side? That’s the problem you’ve set yourself.”
“Oh, God knows, I don’t see my way clear yet. But there’s the outlines of the thing. Now let’s hear the proxime accessit solution.”
“I feel inclined to apologize. I feel ashamed of being so right. But you’ve asked for it. Look here, the thing which has complicated this case so badly is the appearance of bluff. At one moment it looked like suicide pretending to be accident or murder; at another time it looked like murder pretending to be suicide. But the great mountainous fact that stands out is the turning off of the gas. In the event of suicide, that was impossible; in the event of murder, it was curiously needless. For it entirely removed the possibility of a suicide verdict. It was only as I was getting into bed last night that the truth flashed upon me. The gas was turned off by a murderer deliberately, and, mark this, in order to show that the murder was not suicide. It was a deliberate protest, an advertisement. Make what you like of this case (it seemed to say); but do not call it suicide; that at least is outside the scheme of possibilities.”
“Well, my solution was rather by way of allowing for that.”
“To be sure. But, you see, you involve yourself in a hopeless psychological improbability. You make a man commit suicide, leaving behind him an accomplice who will turn off the gas. Now, it’s an extraordinary thing, our human love of interference; but I don’t believe it possible to have an accomplice in suicide. Except, of course, for those ‘death pacts’ which we are all familiar with. Tell anyone that you mean to commit suicide and that person will not only try to dissuade you but will scheme to prevent your bringing the thing off. Suicide here would involve an accomplice; therefore it was not suicide. It was murder; and yet the murderer, so far from wanting to make it appear suicide, was particularly anxious to make it clear that it was not suicide. There is a strange situation for you.
“The strange situations, the mysterious situations, are not those which are most difficult to unravel. You can proceed in this case to look for the murderer in the certainty that he is someone who would stand to lose if a verdict of suicide were brought in. Puzzling it over last night I was unable to conceive such a person. Between you and me, I had been inclined to suspect Brinkman; but there did not seem to be any possible reason why he should want to murder Mottram; and, if he did, there was no conceivable reason why he should want to make it appear that Mottram did not commit suicide. Brinkman was not the heir; the Euthanasia policy did not affect him.
“My discoveries of this morning put me on an entirely different track. There was one man in the world, and only one, whose interest bade him murder Mottram, and murder him in such a way that no suspicion of suicide could rest over the event. I mean, of course, young Simmonds. It was in his interest, as he
